The Canada-based company is keen to bring all of its Montreal employees under one roof and is faced with a dilemma over whether to extend and improve its current stock or to look elsewhere for a more suitable headquarters.
Whichever way Alcan’s bosses decide to go, the decision is likely to have a considerable impact on the market for office space to rent in Montreal, simply because of the scale of its operation in the city, the Montreal Gazette newspaper reports.
One option under consideration is to support the building of a new office tower in the city as the key tenant that developers would need to fund such an ambitious project. Proposals with this aim in mind have reportedly been requested by the company, though the process has been kept very quiet until recently.
The mooted office space move was confirmed as “one option Rio Tinto Alcan is considering”. The other is believed to involve a sizeable refurbishment and extension effort relating to its current headquarters in downtown Montreal.
“We are going to choose the option that is going to help us best achieve our objective of bringing everybody together under one roof and to creating a world-class working environment for our employees,” a spokesman for the company Bryan Tucker told the Gazette.
Montreal is the second largest city in Canada but its commercial property market has been conspicuously slower to bounce back from the difficulties of the past few years than that of Toronto, where several new office blocks have recently reached completion.
Cushman & Wakefield said in December that it expects to see demand for office space in Montreal increase over the course of 2011.
Editor’s notes: As of May 2023, Rio Tinto Alcan keep its headquarter offices in Montreal and lists its address as 400-1190 Av Des-Canadiens-De-Montreal, Montreal, Quebec H3B 0E3 on its website.